We Can\'t Have Everything

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She went to church, her ancestral Episcopalian church, where her
revered Doctor Mosely, the kindliest old gentleman in the world,
had poured sermons down at her like ointment and sent prayers up
like smoke since she was a little girl. But on this day he chose
to preach a ferocious harangue against divorce as the chief peril,
the ruination of modern society.

The cowering Charity got from him the impression that home life
had always been flawless in this country until the last few years,
when divorce began to prosper, and that domestic life in countries
where there is little or no divorce had always been an unmitigated
success. If only divorce and remarriage were ended, the millennium
of our fathers would return.

This had not been her previous opinion; it was her vivid impression
from Doctor Mosely, as honest an old darling as ever ran facts
through a sieve and threw away all the big chunks that would not
go through the fine mesh of his prejudices. He abhorred falsehood,
cruelty, skepticism, sectarianism, and narrowness, and his sermons
were unconscious mixtures of hand-picked truth and eloquent legends,
ruthless denunciations of misunderstood people and views, atheism
toward the revelations of all the sciences (particularly the science
of biblical criticism, which he hated worse than he hated Haeckel),
and a narrowness that kept trying to sharpen itself into a razor
edge.

Fortunately he belied in his life almost all of his pulpit crimes
and moved about, a tender, chivalrous, lovable old gentleman. It
was this phase that Charity knew, for she had not heard one of his
sermons for a year or more, though she saw him often in his parish
work. She was the more amenable to his pulpit logic to-day.

Charity had always assumed that the United States was the most
virtuous, enlightened, and humane of nations. According to Doctor
Mosely, it was shockingly corrupt, disgusting. The family as an
institution was almost completely gone; its only salvation would be
an immediate return to a divorceless condition. (Like that of Italy
and Spain and France during the Middle Ages?)

Hitherto Charity had not thought much about divorce, except to regret
that certain friends of hers had not hit it off better and had had to
undergo cruel notoriety after their private distresses. But divorce
was no longer an academic question to her. It had come home.

When she realized that her husband had been not only neglectful
of her, but devoted to a definite other woman, she felt at first
that it would be heinous to receive him back in her arms fresh from
the arms of a vile creature like Zada L'Etoile. Now she got from
the pulpit the distinct message that just this was her one important
duty, and that any attempt to break from such a triple yoke would be
a monstrous iniquity which the Church could not condone.

Doctor Mosely implied that when one partner to a marriage wandered
aside into forbidden paths (as he very prettily phrased the very ugly
matter) it was always the fault of the other partner. He thundered
that the wives of to-day were not like their simple-minded mothers,
because they played bridge and smoked cigarettes and did not attend
prayer-meetings and would not have children. It was small wonder,
he said, that their husbands could not be held. Doctor Mosely had
preached the same sermon at Charity's mother and her generation,
and his father had preached it at his generation, with the necessary
terms changed and the spirit the same. He and his kind had been
trying since time began to cure the inherent ills of human
relationships by railing at old errors and calling them new.

So in the dark ages the good priests had tried to cure insane people
by shouting denunciations at the devils that inhabited them. The
less they cured the louder they shouted, and when the remedy failed
they blamed the patients.

So fathers try to keep their little sons from being naughty and
untruthful by telling them how good and obedient little boys were
when they were little boys. They tell a silly lie to rebuke a lie
and wonder at their non-success.

Marital unrest is no more a sign of wickedness than stomach-ache is;
it is a result of indigestion or ptomaine poisoning, and divorce is
only a strong purge or an emetic, equally distressing and often
the only remedy.

But Doctor Mosely honestly abominated divorce; he regretted it
almost as much as he regretted the Methodist Episcopal heresies
or the perverseness of the low-Church doctrines.

Charity had always been religious; she had wrecked her health
visiting the sick and cherishing the orphan and she had believed
everything she was told to believe. But now when she went to church
for strength and comfort she came away feeling herself a condemned
and branded failure, blameworthy for all her husband's sins and sins
of her own that she had not suspected.

She prayed to be forgiven for causing her husband to sin and asked
strength to win him back to his duty. She reached home in such a
mood of holy devotion that when she found her husband there she
bespoke him tenderly and put out her arms to him and moaned:

"Forgive me!"

"For what?" he said as he went to her from habit before he could
check himself. But even as he clasped her she felt that his very
sleeves were warm from Zada L'Etoile's embrace and she slipped
through his arms to the floor.

When she came to, she was lying on a couch with a cushion under
her heels, and Cheever was chafing her wrists and kissing her hand.
She drew it away feebly and said:

"Thank you. I'll be all right. Just leave me alone."

He remembered that Zada had said much the same thing. He was glad
to leave the room. When he had gone Charity got up and washed her
hands, particularly the hand, particularly the spot, he had kissed.

She seemed to feel that some of the rouge from Zada's lips had been
left there by Cheever's lips. There was a red stain there and she
could not wash it away. Perhaps it was there because she tried so
hard to rub it off. But it tormented her as she went sleep-walking,
rubbing her hand like another Lady Macbeth.

CHAPTER XIV

On Monday there was a meeting of one of the committees she had
organized for the furtherance of what she called the movie stunt.
The committee met at the Colony Club. Most of the committee were
women of large wealth and of executive ability, and they accomplished
a deal of business with expedition in their own way.

There was some chatter, but it was to the point. At length during
a discussion of various forms of entertainment Mrs. Noxon said she
was afraid that the show would be deadly dull with only amateurs in
it. Mrs. Dyckman thought that professionals would make the amateurs
look more amateurish than ever. The debate swayed from side to side,
but finally inclined toward the belief that a few professional bits
would refresh the audience.

And then suddenly Mrs. Neff had to sing out: "Oh, Charity, I've
an idea. Let's get some stunning dancer to do a special number.
I remember one who would be just the ticket. What's the name--Zada
Le Something or other. She's a gorgeous creature. Have you seen her
recently?"

Several women began signaling wildly to Mrs. Neff to keep quiet.
Charity saw their semaphores at work, but Mrs. Neff was blind--blind,
but not speechless. She kept on singing the praises of Zada till
everybody wanted to gag her.

An open mind to gossip is an important thing. We ought to keep up
with all the scandals concerning our friends and enemies. Otherwise
we lose many an opportunity to undercut the latter and we are
constantly annoying the former.

It was Mrs. Neff, of all people--and she loved Charity Coe
dearly--who caused her public shame and suffering. Mrs. Neff
had defended Charity from the slanderous assumptions of Prissy
Atterbury and had refused to listen to Pet Bettany's echoes.

She had, indeed, a bad reputation for rebuking well-meaning
disseminators of spice. This attitude discouraged several persons
who would otherwise have told her all sorts of interesting things
about Charity's husband's _entente cordiale_ with Zada.

Charity had dwelt in a fool's paradise of trust in Peter Cheever
for a while, then had dropped back into a fool's purgatory of doubt,
where she wandered bewildered. Now she was thrown into the fool's
hell. She knew that her love had been betrayed. Everybody else knew
it and was wondering how she would act.

Charity was sick. This was really more than she had bargained for.
As before, she felt it immodest to expose her emotions in public,
so she said:

"Yes, I've seen her. She is very attractive, isn't she? I don't know
if she is dancing in public any more, but I'll find out."

Mrs. Neff sat back triumphantly and let the meeting proceed. But
there was a gray pall on the occasion. Women began to look at their
wrist-watches and pretend to be shocked at the lateness of the hour,
and all of them shook hands solemnly with Charity. There was a poorly
veiled condolence in their tone.

Charity carried it off pluckily, but she was in a dangerous humor.
She really could not endure the patronizing mercy of these women.

That night Cheever made again his appearance at the dinner-table.
He had some notion of putting Charity off her guard or of atoning
to her in part for his resumed alliance with Zada. He could not have
told what his own motives were, for he was in a state of bewilderment
between his duties to Mrs. Charity Tweedledum and Miss Zada
Tweedledee. He could not tell which one had the greater claim
on his favors.

Charity studied him across the table and wondered what he really was,
faun or traitor, Mormon or weakling. He was certainly handsome, but
the influence of Zada L'Etoile seemed to hang about him like a green
slime on a statue.

She could not find any small talk to carry the meal along. At length
Cheever asked:

"What you been up to all day?"

"Oh, committee stuff--that movie thing, you know."

"How's it coming on? Got a manager yet?"

"Not yet. We were talking about getting some professionals in
to brighten up the evening."

"Good work! Those amateurs make me sick."

"Mrs. Neff proposed that we get some stunning dancer to do a turn."

"Not a bad idea. For instance--"

He emptied his glass of Chablis and the butler was standing by
to refill it when Charity answered:

"Mrs. Neff suggested a dancer I haven't seen on the stage for some
time. You used to admire her."

"Yes?" said Cheever, pushing his glass along the table toward
the butler, who began to pour as Charity slid home her _coup
de grace_.

"Zada L'Etoile. What's become of her?"

Cheever's eyes gaped and his jaws dropped. The butler's expression
was the same. He poured the Chablis on the back of Cheever's hand
and neither noticed it till Charity laughed hysterically and drove
the sword a little deeper:

"Is she still alive? Have you seen her?"

Cheever glared at her, breathed hard, swore at the butler, wiped
his hand on his napkin, gnawed his lips, twisted his mustache,
threw down the napkin, rose, and left the table.

Charity's smile turned to a grimace. She saw that the butler was
ashamed of her. He almost told her that she ought to have known
better than subject him and the other servants to such a scene.

Charity caught herself about to say, "I beg your pardon, Hammond."

She felt as if she ought to beg the pardon of everybody in the world.

She could not stand the lonely dining-room long. She rose and walked
out. It seemed that she would never reach the door. It was a _via
crucis_ to her. Her back ached with the sense of eyes upon it.

The hall was lonely. The thud of the front door jarred her. She went
into the library. It was a dark and frowning cavern. She went into
the music-room, approached the piano, looked over the music, turned
up "Go, Lovely Rose." The rose that Jim Dyckman said she was had been
thrown into the mud. She went up to her room. The maid was arranging
her bed for the night. She had turned down one corner of the cover,
built up one heap of pillows, set one pair of slippers by the edge.

Charity felt like a rejected old spinster. She sat and mused and
her thoughts were bitter. She remembered Doctor Mosely's sermon
and wondered if he would preach what he preached if he knew what
she knew. She would go to him and tell him.

But what did she know? Enough to convince herself, but nothing at
all that even a preacher would call evidence.

She must have proof. She resolved to get it. There must be an
abundance of it. She wondered how one went at the getting of
evidence.

CHAPTER XV

While Charity was resolving to tear down her life Kedzie Thropp was
building herself a new one on the foundations that Charity had laid
for her with a card of introduction to Miss Havender.

In the motion-picture world Kedzie had found herself. Her very
limitations were to her advantage. She would have failed dismally
in the spoken drama, but the flowing photograma was just to her
measure.

The actor must not only know how to read his lines and express
emotions, but must keep up the same spontaneity night after night,
sometimes for a thousand performances or more. The movie actor
is expected to respond to a situation once or twice for rehearsal,
and once or twice for the camera. There is no audience to struggle
against and listen for--and to. The director is always there at
the side calling, reminding, pleading, encouraging, threatening,
suggesting the thoughts, the lines, and the expression, doing all
the work except the pantomime.

That was Kedzie's salvation. Tell her a story and make her the
heroine of it, and her excitable heart would thrill to the emotional
crisis. Take a snapshot of her, and the picture was caught.

Ferriday soon learned this and protected her from her own helpless
vice of discontent. She lapsed always from her enthusiasm after
it was once cold. As an actress she would have been one of those
frequent flashers who give a splendid rehearsal or two and then sink
back into a torpor. She might have risen to an appealing first-night
performance. Thereafter, she would have become dismal. The second
week would have found the audiences disgusted and the third would
have found her breaking her contract and running away with somebody.
A horse that has run away once is likely to run away again. Kedzie
had run away twice.

But the movie life was just the thing for her. She did not play
always the same set scenes in the same scene sets. She was not
required even to follow the logic of the story. For a while she
would play a bit in a tiny angle representing a drawing-room. When
that was taken she would play, not the next moment of the story,
but the next scene in that scene. It might be a year further along
in the story. It was exciting.

Her second picture had great success. She played the girl brought up
as a boy by a cruel Italian padrone who made her steal. Her third
picture was as nearly the same as possible.

Now she was a ragged waif, a girl, who dressed as a boy and sold
newspapers so as to keep her old father in liquor. The garret was
a rickety table, a rusty stove, a broken chair, and a V of painted
canvas walls with a broken window and a paper snowstorm falling
back of it. There Kedzie was found in very becoming ragged breeches,
pouting with starvation. Her father drove her out for gin.

She walked out of the set, picked up a bottle, and brought it back.
The scene in the saloon would be taken later: also the street scenes
to and from.

An officer of the "Cruelty" came and took her from the garret. That
was the beginning of a series of adventures culminating in a marriage
with a multimillionaire. While the garret was set, the finish of
the story was taken.

She ran and changed her costume to one of wealth with ermine. She
came in with the handsome young millionaire. It was the next winter.
Her father was dying. He asked her forgiveness and gave her his
blessing. Then Kedzie changed back to her first costume and went
in the motor to a dismal street where she was shown coming out of
the tenement, and going back to it gin-laden, and again with the
officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

She changed once more to her wealthy garb with the ermine and was
photographed going in with her young millionaire.

The next day the scene in the Cruelty office was built and she acted
in it. The drawing-room in the millionaire's home was assembled and
she acted in that. Then she went out in rags and sold newspapers
on a corner. So it went. The chronology hopelessly jumbled, but
the change incessant.

The studio was a palace of industry. Many of the scenes were played
on the great glass-covered roof. On bright days she would ride in
a closed automobile to some street or some lonely glen or to the
home of some wealthy person who had lent his house to the movies
on the bribe of a gift to his favorite benevolence.

There was the thrill of sitting in the projection-room and watching
herself scamper across the scene, or flirt or weep, look pretty or
gorgeous, sad or gay.

One's own portrait is always a terribly fascinating thing, for it
is always the inaccurate portrait of a stranger curiously akin to
one and curiously alien. But to see one's portrait move and breathe
and feel is magic unbelievable.

In the enlarged close-ups when Kedzie was a girl giantess, the effect
was uncanny. She loved herself and was glad of the friendly dark that
hid her own wild pride in her beauty, but did not prevent her from
hearing the exclamations of Ferriday and the backers and the other
actors who were admitted to the preliminary views.

There was a quality in her work that surpassed Ferriday's
expectations and made her pantomime singularly legible. The
modulations of her thought from one extreme mood to another were
always traceable. This was true of the least feelings. Ferriday
would say: "Now you decide to telephone your lover. You hesitate,
you telephone, a girl answers, you wait, he speaks, you smile."

Kedzie would nod with impatient zest and one could read each
gradation of thought. "I'd better telephone him. I will. No, I'd
better not. Yes. No. Shall I? Well, I will. Hello! Hello, Central!
Hurry up! Gramercy 816. What takes so long? Is this Gramercy 816?
Mr. Monteith. Oh, isn't she smart? What keeps him? Is he out? No,
there he is! Oh, joy! I must be very severe. Hello, Harry."

All these thoughts the spectator could follow. They ran, as it
were, under her skin. There was no stolidity or phlegm. She was
astoundingly alive and real. Unimportant, without sublimity of
emotion or intellectual power, she was irresistibly real. The
public understood all she told it, and adored her.

Her petulance, quick temper, pretty discontent, did not harm her
on the screen, but helped immensely, for they gave her character.
It was delicious to see her eyes narrow with sudden resentment or
girlish malice and widen again with equally abrupt affection. She
was so pretty that she could afford to act ugly.

It took time, however, to get Kedzie from the studio to the negative,
then to the positive. There was editing to do, and it seemed to her
that her most delicious bits had to be cut out, because Ferriday
always took three or four thousand feet of film for every thousand
he used. They had to cut out more Kedzie to let in the titles and
subtitles, and it angered her to see how much space was given to
other members of the cast. She simply loathed the scenes she was not
the center of, and she developed an acerbity of protest against any
"trespass" on her "rights" that proved her a genuine business woman.

She learned the tricks of the trade with magnificent speed. She was
never so meek and helpless of expression as when she slipped in front
of another actor or actress and filled as much of the foreground as
her slenderness permitted. When she was crowded into the background
she knew how to divert attention to herself during the best moments
of the other people in the scene. And she could most innocently spoil
any bit that she did not like to do herself or have done by another.

In the studio she was speedily recognized as an ambitious young woman
zealous for self-advancement. In fact, they called her a "reel hog"
and a "glutton for footage." A number of minor feuds were turned into
deep friendships through a common resentment at Kedzie's impartial
robberies.

Ferriday did not object to these professional traits. They exist
in all trades, and success is never won in large measure without
them. Almost all businesses are little trusts, monopolies more or
less tiny, more or less ruthless.

Ferriday delighted in Kedzie's battle for space with the other
members of the troupe. They kept everybody intense. The lover loved
her better on the screen for hating her personal avarice. Her mother
in the picture was more meltingly tender in her caresses for wanting
to scratch the little cat's eyes out. The clergyman who pointed her
the way to heaven grew more ardently devout for having to grip
the floor with his feet to keep the adoring Kedzie from edging him
off his own pulpit.

This rivalry is better than any number of chaperons, and Kedzie
was saved from any danger of falling in love with the unspeakably
beautiful leading man by the ferocity of her jealousy of him. She
had once, as a little girl in Nimrim, Missouri, nearly swooned at
the glory of this Lorraine Melnotte, and she had written him a little
letter of adoration, one of some nineteen he received that day from
lovelorn girls about the globe.

When she met him first in the studio he was painted as delicately as
a barber-pole, and he stood sweating in a scene under the full blast
of a battery of sick green Cooper-Hewitt lights. He looked about
three days dead and loathsome as an iguana. He was in full evening
dress, and Kedzie had always marveled at the snowiness of his linen.

Now she saw how he got the effect. He wore a yellow shirt, collar,
tie, and waistcoat in order that the photographic result should be
the purest white. The yellow linen was the completing horror under
the spoiled mustard color of his face with its mouth the color of
an overripe plum.

His expression did not redeem his appalling features that day, nor
did his language help. While the cameraman leaned on his idle machine
and looked weary Lorraine Melnotte was having a sweet little row with
the actress playing his sainted mother. He was threatening to have
her fired if she didn't keep her place.

That finished him for Kedzie. She could not tolerate professional
jealousy. She never could. Her own was merely a defense of her
dignity and her rights against the peculiarly impossible people who
infested the studio. That was Kedzie's own phrase, for she had not
lived with a poet long before she began to experiment with large
words. She practised before a mirror any phrases she particularly
liked. She had probably heard Ferriday use the expression and she
got herself up on it till she was glib. Anybody who can be glib
with "peculiarly impossible" is in a fair way to be articulate.
All Kedzie needed was a little more certainty on her grammar; and
her ear was giving her that.

Her contempt for Lorraine Melnotte culminated in a dark suspicion
that that was not his real born name. If Anita Adair was Kedzie
Thropp what would Lorraine Melnotte have been? It was a pretty
problem in algebra. But Kedzie despised a man that would take
another name. And such a name--as unworthy of a man as a box of
chocolate fudge.

So the image of Mr. Melnotte fell out of the niche in her heart and
went over into the gallery of her hates. She fought him with every
weapon and every foul thrust known to shy little women in dealing
with big, blustering men. She loved to call him "Melnit" or
"naughty Mel."

He was lost from the start and was soon begging to be released from
his contract. The backers were too sure of his vogue, however, to
let him go, and it was none of their affair how fiercely Adair and
Melnotte indulged in mutual loathing, so long as their screen-love
was so wholesomely sweet.

With Ferriday Kedzie's relations were more perilous. He had invented
her and was patenting her. She dreaded his wisdom and accepted his
least theory as gospel--at first. He combined a remote and godlike
intellect with a bending and fatherly grace. And now and then, like
the other gods of all the mythologies, he came down to earth in
an amorous mood.

Now Kedzie's surety was her canny realization of the value of
tantalism. She was not long left in ignorance of his record for
flitting fancy and she felt that he would flit from her as soon
as he conquered her. Her duty was plain.

She played him well and drove him frantic. It would have been hard
to say whether he hated her or loved her more when he found her
always just a little beyond. He had begun with the greatest gift in
his power. He had promised her world-wide fame, and no other gift
could count till he had made that good. And it would take a long,
long while of incessant labor to build.

Ferriday belittled himself in Kedzie's eyes by his groans of baffled
egotism. She could read his plots on his countenance, and thwart him
in advance. But this was not always easy for her, and again and again
he had only himself to blame for his non-success with Kedzie's heart.
With Kedzie's fame he was having a very sudden and phenomenal triumph
--if anything could be called phenomenal in a field which itself was
phenomenal always.